CSS3

News about developments in CSS 3 is hard to come by at the moment, so please forgive the slow rate of updates on the site in the last month. I attended the @media conference here in London last week and news on progress in CSS was noticeable by its absence, when even HTML 5 had its own session.

I see that Bert Bos has delivered a couple of presentations on the Template (formerly ‘Advanced’) Layout Module, but I can’t find slides of them anywhere. If anyone attended the talks and can send us copies, do please get in touch.

Other than that, the only news is that the CSS WG have released their list of expected module deliverables; the modules listed in the 2007 snapshot along with Media Queries look set to be Recommendations shortly, with many others to take on Candidate Recommendation status.

And that’s it. Sorry there isn’t more, or that it isn’t more exciting. I’m aiming to put together a load of new examples soon, so that should be more interesting!

Update: As mentioned in a comment below, no sooner do I say there’s not much going on than David Baron announces that the remaining CSS3 selectors have been implemented in a build of Mozilla (which will probably be seen in Firefox 3.1), and Media Queries are set to follow. That’s good news.

Over at Design Shack they’re four posts into the five-post Introduction to CSS3, which covers Borders, Text Effects, the User Interface and (coming soon) Multiple Columns. A nice intro to the subject if our own examples are too complicated for you :p

The new owners of the Fonts and Web Fonts modules, Jason Cranford Teague and John Daggett, say that only about 20% of the Web Fonts module is required for CSS (it is currently part of the SVG charter), and propose simplifying it before merging with the Fonts module. They hope to have a working draft of the new spec in August.

Jason Cranford Teague has volunteered to edit the CSS Basic UI, CSS Hyperlink Presentation, CSS Fonts and CSS Web Fonts modules and is looking for feedback from users on the latter two. He asks:

Tell me what you think are some of the font styles and features missing from the current specification. What do you expect to be able to do with typography on your Web pages that you can not do now? What are you doing now with kludges that you would like to see simpler ways of doing?

Leave a comment on his blog if you have any ideas; and why not leave a comment here, too, to let us know what your opinions are? No deadline has been given, but I suppose it’s the sooner, the better.

This week has seen the release of a raft of new proposals for features to be integrated into the CSS specification:

• CSS Animation
• CSS Transforms
• CSS Transitions
• CSS Variables

I personally have reservations about the Visual Effects proposals, feeling this is better suited to Javascript, but I seem to be in the minority on this so I will cede to the majority. I’m pretty excited about Variables, however.

The CSS WG had a face-to-face meeting in San Diego last month, and have released their latest resolutions in a series of posts on their blog:

Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI

Some of the highlights I saw on my first read through:

• Apple’s proposed animation & transition properties are to be considered.
• Web fonts are to be worked on with the SVG team
• The Advanced Layout module is still being discussed but will be renamed the Template Layout module
• A new type of list, tree-lines, was proposed
• A proposal for the use of constants will be published

Obviously there’s a lot more in there, but it’s nice to see that the Working Group is working!

Apple surprised a lot of people by releasing Safari 3.1 today (myself included!), and amongst its list of new & improved features (audio and video tags! SVG in img and background-image!) are two which will be of interest to readers of this blog: full CSS3 selectors support, and web fonts.

The first means that Safari now supports the missing nth-child / nth-of-type selectors, which are useful for styling tables and lists (amongst others), and also now passes our Selectors Test (which, while by no means exhaustive, is very useful). Opera 9.5 will also support these selectors; Firefox 3 probably won’t, IE8 is unknown.

The second is the more exciting to me, and I’ve already written a quick introduction (with example) on my own blog. In a nutshell, you can now embed fonts in your pages to display even to users who don’t have that font installed. There’s a longer article with more examples on A List Apart.

We’d known most of this was being implemented by Webkit/Safari, but had no idea it would be coming so soon. Congratulations to the whole team, and here’s hoping it serves as an example to the other browser makers.

Daniel Glazman has created a new test to show CSS3 Selectors support in your browser. He has also posted results for current browsers.

With this and the Acid 3 test, there’s a lot for browser makers to aim for.

Mozilla’s John Resig has removed support for certain CSS3 selectors from the jQuery Javascript library, and says the fact that no-one has asked for them to be reintroduced is evidence that they aren’t very useful:

Now, I’m sure I’ll probably get lots of feedback saying “but ‘E + F’ can be useful, look at this example” or “of course ~= is useful, you can use it on rel attributes” – that’s not the point. The fact is that they are woefully un-used. To the point that they are a burden upon the implementors of the specification. What’s the point of implementing the above features – or more importantly: optimizing the above features for speed – if no one is using them.

Daniel Glazman, who authored the original spec, says that John is looking at them from a purely HTML-centric viewpoint, that lack of support means that people haven’t really thought of using them yet, and that just because the majority don’t have a use for them, doesn’t mean that they are useless;

So we have here selectors that are not implemented yet or not interoperably and Web designers don’t use them. How surprising!!! In CSS, we have some features here to serve some typographic local constraints, because we saw a menu in a restaurant nicely designed and we needed a new feature to be able to make it in CSS. Serves a very little community of users. That community will NEVER show up in any stat. Is that a reason to drop the feature? You don’t see a wide community of users for a given selector? Is that a reason to drop it? CERTAINLY NOT.

I’m with Daniel on this one; the key point for me is that the support for them at the moment is so limited that we haven’t yet seen what the talented development community can do with them. I’m sure I, as a front-end HTML developer, won’t use them as frequently as the existing selectors, but I already use some of them infrequently and look forward to using them more.

While thinking about suggestions for new features wanted in CSS3, my mind strayed onto image replacement methods. At the moment we have a cornucopia of methods, none of which resolves the style on/images off problem without extra markup (I’m referring to CSS-only techniques).

CSS3 should be able to solve this problem for us, shouldn’t it? Isn’t that what it’s for? My initial idea was to suggest a pseudo-class that detected whether or not images were disabled and changed the content accordingly; something like:

h1 {
background-image:  url('image.png');
text-indent: -9999px;
}

h1::no-images { text-indent: 0; }

After doing a quick search, I found out that a solution has already been proposed, and it is much more elegant than mine! It uses the content declaration to replace the content, with a fallback option given after a comma:

h1 { content: url('image.png'), contents }

On the unofficial CSSWG wiki, the idea has been taken even further and the require-font function added; using this will allow you to instruct the browser to use a required font if available, download it if not, display an image if that’s not possible, or display in the fallback font style if none of the previous apply:

h1 {
content: require-font('FF Meta Serif'), url('image.png'), contents;
}

A very neat solution! The drawback? Although accepted, this is not in the Generated and Replaced Content draft yet; and the module has been assigned a low priority.

Much of the editorial work done on the various CSS3 modules is done in private. Due to this, there is often the impression that no progress is being made. This impression is deepened if you look at the date of publication for many of the public drafts. However, the perception is not always the same as reality. Some of the editorial work has been made public on the W3C Public CVS Repository for a few modules, and there has been some nice progress.

I’ll start with the module that seems to have the most demand from developers – Backgrounds & Borders. The Working draft that I’ve just linked was last updated in 2005, but as you can see the Editors draft has moved on somewhat, with its last update on Christmas Day (someone was busy giving us a Christmas present). It also has an additional editor, which should speed things up.

So what is new here? Well one of the most demanded properties is border-radius. WebKit and Gecko both implement this, but implemented it in different ways. This has been resolved in this latest draft, to define it to be the same as how Gecko implemented it, but with the addition of a / notation so that both the x and the y radius can be specified in the border-radius shorthand notation. An example of this would be as follows:

border-radius: 1em 2em 3em / 2em 1em;

This would give the top left corner a radius of 1em for the horizontal radius and 2em for the vertical radius. For the top right, it is quite clear that this would be 2em for the horizontal and 1 em for the verticle. As there isn’t a radius value for the verticle bottom right, it takes the value of the top left (opposite corner) which is 2em, and the same for the bottom left corner for both values (2em / 1em).

You can also see the spec defines what happens when the intersecting borders are a different thickness. This property should be more or less ready for implementation, or adapting to the new spec in the case of Safari and Firefox. As always test cases are important, so that implementations can be made interoperable. If any developers want to make any then that would be higly useful.

The box-shadow property has been split in this draft to border-shadow and background-shadow, but I’ve been told this will be changed back to be more inline with what Safari does. The border-image and comma notation for multiple background images are pretty much stable now too.

The Backgrounds and Borders module isn’t the only one to go through changes however. The Namespaces module was also updated on Christmas day and can be found here in Editorial draft form. This has also gained an additional editor. As this module is brief and has already been included in the 2007 CSS snapshot, I assume the changes are just trivial tidying up. I didn’t notice any glaring changes when briefly checking it out. This module is also widely implemented (except IE), so likely doesn’t need much updating.

Grid positioning module is something that has also been in high demand. The fine folks over at Microsoft have been busy on updating this spec, with the editors draft last published in October. You can see a lot of new pretty pictures in the spec. Props for the use of Khoi Vinh’s Yahoo!-a-like Yeaaah example. I look forward to when this reaches an implementable state.

Also updates recently and included on the public server are Paged media, Text and Text Layout. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see what has changed here.

As well as CSS3 modules, are APIs for the CSS Object Model and CSSOM View module. This is designed to replace DOM Level 2 Style in due course, and are very early level drafts.

As all of these modules are editorial drafts, it should be pointed out that they may change at any time, and any changes are not finalised or offical W3C specs. It is exciting however that there is clear signs of progress, and that the important Backgrounds & Borders module is maturing.